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Monday, 1 October 2012

THE USES OF SECULAR RULERS AND CHARACTERS IN THE WELSH SAINTS’ LIVES IN THE VESPASIAN LEGENDARY (MS. COTTON VESPASIAN A. XIV.)

Found another very interesting dissertation by Luciana Meinking Guimarães whilst browsing. Here is part of the introduction and then the link to the work.

The idea of this research arose from the study of the instrumentalisation of the figure of King
Arthur in four Saints’ Lives found in the manuscript of the British Library Cotton Vespasian
A. xiv . Arthur’s instrumentalisation in the Saints’ Lives implied an examination of the claims
which each hagiographer made by inventing or (re-)elaborating specific Arthurian anecdotes.
The thought of grasping the “hagiographers’ intentions” in their uses of Arthur in order to
envisage what their possible religious and/or political claims could have been, suggested a
change in the approach to the hagiographical material. It presupposed a certain distance from
the use of the texts within the literary context of the genre of saintly biography – with its
edifying tones to the greatness and holiness of the main characters – to one which
concentrated on the worldview of the hagiographers and their responses to historical events.
This, however, did not seem to be an uncontroversial task in view of the seemingly literary
treatment given to the secular rulers in these writings.

After studying in detail the Arthurian Welsh Lives of Saints Cadog, Illtud, Padarn and
Carannog, the hagiographers’ treatments of other secular characters came to the fore in that
they showed that not only Arthur, the “King,” received much of the hagiographers’ attention
but also other greater or lesser kings with more established historical backgrounds in the
Welsh context, as is the particular case with King Maelgwn of Gwynedd. This would beg the
question of whether our modern understanding of the Arthurian legend has influenced our
perception of the role that Arthur played in these medieval texts and of whether Geoffrey of
Monmouth’s Historia Regum Brittanniae, with its appropriation and re-elaboration of
Arthur’s career, might have contributed to push into oblivion other candidates’ chances to be
invested with much more elaborated historical legends. Another important aspect was the
acknowledgement of the difference with which the hagiographers treated secular characters
like Arthur and Maelgwn – whose historical or pseudo-historical activities would be placed in
the early middle ages – in opposition to the treatment given to contemporary or almostcontemporary
historical rulers of Anglo-Saxon, Welsh and/or Norman origins, like Edward
the Confessor, Harold Godwinesson, Gruffudd ap Llywelyn, Caradog ap Gruffudd ap
Rhydderch and William the Conqueror. The few analyses of medieval hagiographical material
written in Wales concentrated, however, on the hagiographers’ treatments of their hero-saints,
on the establishment of a biographical structure which, in its main pattern, followed not only
that of main stream Western hagiography but also contributed to pinpoint specific Welsh
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characteristics and to emphasise, therefore, the cultural differences pertaining to the Welsh
people (cf. Rees 1936, Henken 1983, 1987 and 1991, Smith 1990: 338-343).